“Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous
rubbish”: Samuel Beckett’s representation of the human condition as
regulated by waste in Breath, a
playlet of 1969, now reads as a striking anticipation of our present race
against ecological catastrophe. However, if there is now a pressing need for us
to re-think our attitudes towards consumption, this change should also extend to
certain aspects of our approaches to literature, film, and critical theory. This
two-day conference entitled “Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern
Wastelands” seeks to outline contexts for conceptualising abundance and waste.
It invites proposals that argue for the existence of specific perspectives on
abundance and waste in strands of modernist and postmodernist literature as well
as film. Suggested topics might include but are not limited to:

The body as cultural wastelandAnorexic spaces (of discourse and/or in performance)Corporeality, exhaustion, and wasteThe hunger artist/ the art of hungerInfluence as recyclingLiterature, critical theory, and consumptionGender
politics, abundance, and wasteLabour and deprivationConsumption and warComfort and wasteIgnorance and abundanceWaste and the collectivityThe spatial economics of wasteWaste and abundance in the metropolisWaste, abundance, and exoticismAbundance and primitivismThe use of litter in representations of material scarcityWaste, abundance, and the politics of the avant-gardeTime-wasting and modernityTime, acceleration, and consumptionGlobalisation and consumer angst/complacencyAbundance and Marxist theoryShame, waste, and postcolonial
theoryNegotiating abundance and waste in contemporary IrelandRedefining the contours of ecocriticism